by Ian McDonald
‘I’m a geographer, not a physician,’ he muttered, but yet knelt down beside the sister. ‘Get back get back, give the woman some air, let her see the light.’ After a brief examination he drew Quinn and Captain Acunha into his confidence. ‘She is terribly burned over the major part of her body; I do not know if she inhaled flame, but her breathing is shallow, labored and heavy with phlegm: at the very least I would say that her lungs have been damaged by smoke. I have seen many a loom fire in Lyon; they can spontaneously combust in cotton duff. I certainly know that it is more often the smoke that kills. But I fear the greatest damage lies here.’ He held up a pair of botanical tweezers; caught in their tips a tiny white ovoid the size of a grain of rice.
‘A botfly egg,’ Acunha said.
‘Indeed sir. Her burns are infested with them; infested, some have already hatched. From that we may deduce that the town was set to the torch not less than three days ago.’
‘God and Jesus, they will eat her alive.’ Acunha crossed himself, kissed his two fingers.
‘I fear there is very little we can do save make her comfortable and easy. Captain, there is an herbal simple I have seen used in Belém do Pará; acculico it is called, a stimulant herb but with a potency for analgesia. I believe it would ease this woman’s suffering.’
Captain Acunha dipped his head in acknowledgment.
‘The galley master keeps a supply in his sabretache. It puts a wondrous spark in the slaves’ stamina.’
‘Good good. A few balls should suffice. Now, we must move her. Gently, gently.’A hammock slung from a bamboo pole negotiated the postulant as tenderly as they could over to Fé em Deus, but she still screamed and wept at every jolt and rub of her exposed tissue against the weave of the fabric. The slaves carried her to an awning on the aft deck. Falcon administered the leaf and in time soothed the woman’s ravings to a dull, relentless mad burble.
Quinn remained on the boat-church. He knelt to the altar, blessed himself, and lifted one of the charred papers. Music notation: a Mass by Tassara of Salvador. To the greater glory of God. A simple, riverside church; Quinn had passed many such in the floating villages along the varzea, the seasonal flood plain of the river, rising and falling on their pontoons with the waters. They were without exception trading posts, supply depots for river traffic and lines into the vast hinterland; their church a simple wood-and-thatch pontoon, a raised wooden platform for sanctuary, horns and clappers for summoning bells. An altar cloth worked with glowing, fantastical representations of the four Evangelists in braid and plaited feathers lay half burned at the foot of the altar. It would have brought a fine price at any floating market, but the defilers had preferred to burn it, to burn everything.
This was a judgment, Luis Quinn thought.
The altar was strewn with lumps of rain-softened excrement. Quinn swept them away, cleaned the Communion table with the rags of its former covering, choking at the reek of human filth, smoke, and wet ash. He fetched the cross from the midden of half-burned rubbish where it had been flung. It was as intricate and fabulous as the altar cloth; minutely carved and painted panels depicted the Stations of the Cross. Quinn kissed the panel of Christ Crucified at its center, held his lips a lingering moment before setting the cross in its place. He stepped back, dipped his head in a bow, then genuflected and again crossed his breast.
The Fallen Cross. The permit for Just War.
The postulant would not tolerate Quinn’s presence until he changed his dress for a white shirt and breeches. ‘She fears my robe not my face,’ Quinn commented, setting lights to drive off the mosquitoes. ‘A Carmelite mission, a poor enough place though they modeled themselves on the Jesuits. Music in church; daub, all that stuff. Who would attack a river mission?’
‘Not bandeirantes, never bandeirantes,’ Captain Acunha said, shaking his head. He was a thickset, squat man, of bad complexion and coarse, greasy hair; thickly bearded; more slavemaster than shipmaster. ‘They would never descend a raft town.’
‘These are hungry times for flesh,’ Quinn said.
Acunha stared at Luis Quinn, eyes dark like a monkey’s in his thick facial hair.
‘It was the Dutch, Dutch bastards; they’ve always had their eyes on the northern bank. Weigh there! Weigh anchor, get us moving, we’ve been too long here.’ The bluff assertion of command, but Quinn heard a discord of anxiety in his voice. The Dutch are traders, not slavers. Three days ago the raiders had struck. The people stolen from this town must have already passed them, anonymous, unremarked, wired together through the ear, or the nose, like animals tamed to the plow.
Calls from the water; the Pauxi scouts had swum over to other burned houses and returned with news that they exchanged with Acunha in short, accented stabs of language like arrows.
Acunha beckoned Quinn to him.
‘They have found the bodies of the friars in other houses,’ he said in a low voice.
‘Dead,’ Quinn said.
‘Of course. And . . . bad. Badly used. Used abominably.’
‘I do not need to hear,’ Quinn said with heat and power. ‘They desecrated . . . I went into the church . . . the altar, the filth, human filth . . .’
Falcon joined them.
‘She is speaking now.’
‘Has she any information?’ Quinn asked.
‘Ravings. Visions. Again and again she returns to a hallucination of angels of judgment, angels of retribution, a host of them, their feet touching the treetops. Gold and silver angels. The friars and irregular sisters went out to meet them. The angels told them they had been judged and found wanting. Then they seared the village with swords of fire. She herself hid beneath the altar when the angels burned the church around her. The rest were gathered up and told they had failed and would be descended into slavery.’
‘Angels?’ Quinn asked.
‘Her mind is utterly destroyed.’
‘And yet I am reminded of a legend from Salvador, of the angels battling in Pelourinho with blades of light. The angels that brought the horse plague.’
‘And there is your habit . . .’
‘The Society of Jesus has no habit; our attire is nothing other than conventional priestly dress; sober, simple, practical.’
A dry, cracking cry came from the awning. Quinn hastened to the Carmelite’s side, lifted her head to offer her water from the pewter mug. Falcon watched him gently sponge the ruined face and clean the botfly eggs from the suppurating burns. Pity, rage, sorrow, helplessness - the violence of his emotions, the complexity of their interactions like patterns in a weave, shocked him. Brazil, you madman? Orsay at the Academy had exclaimed when Falcon had approached him to fund his expedition. Greed, vanity, rapacity, brutality, and contempt for life are vices to all the great nations of the world. In Brazil they are right virtues and they practice them with zeal.
Weary and world-sick, Falcon stepped through the chained bodies pulling at their oars to his hammock reslung in the bow of the ship. The slaves, the ship, the river and its fugitive peoples, its sacked aldeias and vain mission churches, were but gears and windlasses in a vast dark engenho never ceasing, ever grinding, crushing out commerce. Nation building, the enlightened uplift of native peoples, the creation of culture, learning, art, were trash: wealth was the sole arbiter, personal wealth and aggrandizement. No university, not even a printing press in all of Brazil. Knowledge was the preserve of noble, queenly Portugal. Brazil was to keep its back bent to the capstan.
The peças hauled, and Fé em Deus crawled along the vast river. Falcon watched Quinn sit with the destroyed woman, at times talking to her, at times reading his Spiritual Exercises with fierce concentration. Falcon tried to sketch in his expedition log his memory of the boat-town. Planes, angles of mist and shadow; meaningless, hieratic. This is a river of fear, he wrote. The refined soul naturally veers from melodrama, but Brazil turns hyperbole into reality. There is a spirit here, lowering, oppressive, dreadful. It saps the heart and the energy as surely as the monstrous heat and humidity,
the ceaseless insects, the daily torrential downpours; rain warm as blood that yet chills the bone. I find I can almost believe anything I am told of the Amazon; that the boto is some mermaid-creature that rises from the river at night to take human lovers and father pink-skinned children; of the curupira with his feet turned the wrong way, deceiver of hunters, protector of the forest. On these hot, sleepless nights it is too easy to hear the uakti, vast as a ship, hasting through the night forest, the wind drawing strange music from the many fluted holes throughout its body. And what of the woman-warriors after whom this river was (mis)-named, the Amazons themselves?
The shadows grew long, the swift dark came down, and Fé em Deus resounded with the cries and noises of a ship anchoring for the night. Falcon felt old, thin and fragile as a stick in a drought, close to his own mortality. The figures in the aft deck, darkest of all, ink on indigo. The palm oil wicks in their terracotta pots drew studies of Quinn’s face as he ministered to the dying woman. Falcon knew well the hand gestures, the motions of the lips.
Quinn came forward for a fresh beaker of water and Falcon said softly, ‘Did you administer extreme unction to that woman?’
Quinn ducked his head. ‘I did, yes, I did.’
The fear that he too was no more than a notch on a belt running through this airless, blood-fueled mill kept Falcon from easy sleep, but as the immense, soft southern stars arced over him the gentle sway of Fé em Deus on the current sent him down into dreams of angels, huge as thunderheads, moving slowly yet irresistibly along the channels and tributaries of the Amazon, their toenails, the size of sails, drawing wakes in the white water.
In the morning the postulant was missing from the ship.
‘You were with her; how could this have happened?’ Falcon’s voice was an accusation.
‘I slept,’ Luis Quinn said simply, mildly. Falcon’s temper flared.
‘Well where is she, man? She was in your care.’
‘I fear she went into the river. The acculico was used up. In the madness of her torment she may have made an end of herself.’
‘But that is desperation, that is a mortal sin.’
‘I trust in the grace and mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Falcon looked again at his companion. He wore again his simple, unaffected black habit and skullcap and his face a set of resigned concern, spiritual distance, sorrow, and inevitable loss. You lie, Jesuit, Falcon said to himself. You were complicit; she confessed that final, mortal sin to you and you absolved her. You did not stop her. Did you even help her? From her hammock, to the side, over the rail into the kind water?
‘I bitterly regret my inability to save the sister,’ Quinn said as if reading Falcon’s doubts. ‘I shall pray for her soul and repose when we reach São José Tarumás and for myself do penance. For now, by your leave, my Spiritual Exercises have been neglected and I must attend to them.’
OUR LADY WHO APPEARED
MAY 30-JUNE 4, 2006
The adherents of Santo Daime drove good cars: Scandinavians, Germans, high-end Japanese. They were parked ten deep around the private gym in Recreio dos Bandeirantes. Valets cleaned windows and vacuumed interiors; their fresh wax finishes hugging the yellow parking-lot lights to their streamlines. Private security with berets and their pants tucked into their boots patrolled in pairs, hands resting lightly on light automatic weapons. A woman with her blond-streaked hair scraped painfully back beneath her green beret inspected Marcelina’s letter of introduction three times. Her cap badge carried a crest of a mailed fist clutching crossed lightning bolts. A little excessive, Marcelina thought. She took Marcelina’s P DA and celular.
‘No pictures.’
Her colleague, a shave-skull thug, harassed the taxi driver, checking his number plate against his hackney license, mumbling intimidating nothings into his collar-mike. Marcelina loathed security. They had bounced her out of too many and better gigs than this. But in the scented cool of the parking lot she heard the drums sway on the heavy air and felt the rhythms of the Green Saint begin to move her.
Her letter was again inspected in the lobby by an abiá with a white cloth wound around his head in a loose turban. He was a very young, very pure alva. Marcelina suspected it was so for most of the iâos of the Barquinha do Santo Daime. He had no idea what he was reading.
‘This will get you into the terreiro. After that it’s up to you; my favors are all used up.’
Go somewhere once and you will go there again. For the second time that week Marcelina had arced out over Guanabara Bay to receive herbal tea in Feijão’s humid, scented bower. She had let the porcelain Japanese bowl sit untouched on the low plastic table before her. Did you drug me, did you feed me holy secrets? But she felt that Feijão might have been close for some time to the Barquinha; some fissure had taken place and he had called in an uncomfortable debt. Such intrigue for a disgraced goalkeeper.
Exu, Lord of the Crossings, stood on either side of the futsal court’s double doors; cheap poured concrete effigies of the deity in his malandro aspect: a grinning preto in a white suit and Panama hat and shoes, garishly painted. Marcelina pushed open the doors. The drumming leaped in her face.
Marcelina adored the frenzy of Rio’s homebrew religions; at New Year she loved to step out the front door of her apartment block and lose herself in the chaos of two million pressing souls on the Copacabana, throwing flowers into the waves as offerings to the Lady of the Sea. For a week after the beach stank of the rotting petals cast up on the strand, but Marcelina would swing barefoot through them, sensing through her bare feet the water-memory of madness. The truest religions were the ones that most deeply kissed the irrational, the ecstatic, and in that Santo Daime was less ridiculous than many. The mood in the room was taut, breathless, alien. She knew that the worshippers had been drumming, dancing, spinning since early evening. It would not be long now. She only needed to be there for the third act.
She found a place at the low curving wall of the futsal court among the shuffling, hands-raising devotees. As a dancer in the center of the court spun back to the walls a worshipper, eyes closed, would spiral out to take his place, bare feet rucking up the carefully laid plastic sheeting.
Marcelina knew what that was for.
All the worshippers wore some measure of white; the head-cloth as minimum for the abiás, a white shift in what looked to Marcelina like shiny, ugly, static-clingy polyester for the initiates. She would have felt conspicuous but that the worshippers had been spun so far out of themselves by two and a half hours of drum and dance that they would not have noticed Godzilla. Not so conspicuous, though, as an elderly, black ex-goalkeeper. She scanned the room. White meat, whiter even than her carioca-German DNA. She could understand the appeal of the shamanistic, the communal and unconstrained to the white middle classes behind their security fences and surveillance cameras and armed guards. The wilder world, the spirit of the deep forest, within reasonable limits and a twenty-minute commute-time every other Tuesday evening. Her eyebrows rose slightly at a handful of Nationally Recognizable Faces: two telenovela stars and a pop-ette famous for emulating everything Madonna did, but in a Brasileiro way. No wonder beret-girl had lifted her cameras. Marcelina entertained herself by calculating how much Caras magazine would pay for shots of the worship’s inevitable conclusion.
The urn, covered with a white cloth, stood on a small altar beneath a garden sun canopy over the penalty area. The bateria was behind the goal line: they played as well as white people could be expected. A very spaced girl pounded on a hip-slung bass drum. A tall man with long, graying hair tied in a ponytail and a grayer Santa Claus beard could only be Bença Bento. An environmentalist, Marcelina knew from her research. Went up to protect the Roraima and came back having met God. Or whatever Santo Daime believed ordered the universe. The divine. She wondered how many of the high-gloss SUVs parked outside ran on biofuel. Bença Bento was as relaxed as if he were in his own front room, chatting amiably to the bateria’s alabé and the Barquinha’s ekedis
, who all seemed to be postmenopausal women swathed in white, moving unconsciously but stiffly to the drums. In a momentary flash, Marcelina pictured her mother among them, imagined her bossa nova organ doubling with the bateria. Flash again: she momentarily locked eyes with a figure across the barracão. Its head was completely wrapped in white cloth so that only the eyes were exposed. Marcelina could not tell if it was man or woman, but the eyes were at once familiar and disturbing. She looked away; the rhythm changed, the dancers, loose-limbed and drenched with sweat, spun back to the edges of the court. Bença Bento stepped into the pavilion and removed the white cloth from the urn.
The communion was about to begin. The eguns stepped forward with supermarket tubes of disposable plastic cups, cafezinho sized. Not so ecofriendly that, either. Why are you mocking? Marcelina asked herself as the women filed past the urn, filling cups. What do you do up in that walled garden in Silvestre with your songs and your berimbaus that is so very different?
The music ended. Bença Bento raised his arms.